Analysis of the academic and formative perspective of social pedagogy from an international comparative perspective

Resumen

Currently, social pedagogy still has to face a series of controversial issues that generates a great difficulty in the development of a universally accepted definition. In turn, social pedagogy responds to social, political and cultural approaches in each country, which concept has been used in different contexts with different meanings. Can we talk about conceptual approaches, normative values and shared working methods? This study, which is part of a wider research, aims to provide a qualitative leap towards the construction of a common and universally accepted core of social pedagogy. Two phases of study are presented: 1) an analysis of the vision of academic experts of social pedagogy through a Delphi process, where has been define, validated and agreed the most important dimensions of social pedagogy (contextual, historical, epistemological, functional, professional); 2) a descriptive analysis of the current training offer in social pedagogy in the best universities in different countries. The contents of curricula have been analyzed according to the dimensions of social pedagogy defined by academic experts. The results indicate that there is a concordance between what the academics say and the formative contents in relation to the political, ethical and social dimension of the context; the variety of intervention areas and the use of methodologies. On the contrary, the epistemological, professional, historical and functional dimensions have little presence in the contents of university studies of social pedagogy.